grip of death. Its cold, baleful serpent's eyes shone, as
evil as ever. But it was dying. In vain it writhed and struggled.
Nothing availed it.

Once or twice the mussurama took a turn round the middle of the body
of its opponent, but it did not seem to press hard, and apparently
used its coils chiefly in order to get a better grip so as to crush
the head of its antagonist, or to hold the latter in place. This
crushing was done by its teeth; and the repeated bites were made with
such effort that the muscles stood out on the mussurama's neck. Then
it took two coils round the neck of the jararaca and proceeded
deliberately to try to break the backbone of its opponent by twisting
the head round. With this purpose it twisted its own head and neck
round so that the lighter-colored surface was uppermost; and indeed at
one time it looked as if it had made almost a complete single spiral
revolution of its own body. It never for a moment relaxed its grip
except to shift slightly the jaws.

In a few minutes the jararaca was dead, its head crushed in, although
the body continued to move convulsively. When satisfied that its
opponent was dead, the mussurama began to try to get the head in its
mouth. This was a process of some difficulty on account of the angle
at which the lower jaw of the jararaca stuck out. But finally the head
was taken completely inside and then swallowed. After this, the
mussurama proceeded deliberately, but with unbroken speed, to devour
its opponent by the simple process of crawling outside it, the body
and tail of the jararaca writhing and struggling until the last.
During the early portion of the meal, the mussurama put a stop to this
writhing and struggling by resting its own body on that of its prey;
but toward the last the part of the body that remained outside was
left free to wriggle as it wished.

Not only was the mussurama totally indifferent to our presence, but it
was totally indifferent to being handled while the meal was going on.
Several times I replaced the combatants in the middle of the table
when they had writhed to the edge, and finally, when the photographers
found that they could not get good pictures, I held the mussurama up
against a white background with the partially swallowed snake in its
mouth; and the feast went on uninterruptedly. I never saw cooler or
more utterly unconcerned conduct; and the ease and certainty with
which the terrible poisonous snake was mastered gave me the